The past few weeks Thom Stokkel and myself were busy planning and organising a special event – the first joint operation between Xi Online and Bashers: a discussion night about game journalism in The Netherlands. Continue reading
Xi’s first special of the year just aired this tuesday (finally), and its main focus is religion. The special consists of several articles analyzing religion, using film, television or new media as a perspective. Needless to say, I chose new media as a perspective to offer an introduction to a mysterious, yet fascination “religion”: the Illuminati. Continue reading
Using something lame like ‘attracting visitors’ as an excuse to write about porn, Xi Magazine published a special about porn today. Hurray! A selection of writers all came up with an article dealing with porn, using film, television or new media as a framework, which resulted in a very enjoyable collection of surprising articles. Be sure to check them all! Continue reading
Starting this week, there’s a new section at Xi Online, which is called “new media criticism”. Thom and I take turns in analyzing an interesting article (i.e. from the news or blogosphere) dealing with new media and/or games. The commentaries are somewhere around 600 words: it’s not intended to provide a very deep analysis. The section’s main goal is to shed a different light on the chosen blog/article, inspired by Metareporter. Continue reading
Review F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin (Xbox 360/Playstation 3)
Well, Monolith listened to its fans: FEAR 2 offers more open envirnmonts, more action and more diversity. But it’s these new aspects that harm the essence of a horror game like FEAR: a compelling atmosphere, constant threat and really being scared. While these horror-sequences are still present and they’re still very decent and scary, the action is everything but compelling. During the shootouts FEAR 2 is just your average shooter. Even the parts where you get to operate a huge Mech are lame, they just don’t feel right in a FEAR-game. Add to this the mediocre graphics and the long awaited sequel isn’t the mindblowing game we’ve been expecting.
Read the full article here (Dutch).